There are two broad pathways to efficiency and sustainable practice.

Mandated requirements to look beyond economic considerations demand that we make a concerted effort seek out new ways and means of developing efficient and sustainable business practices.

The first pathway is one we all understand and routinely apply – i.e. conserving our resources so they are not depleted and therefore available for ongoing use. The second involves designing new and improved ways of doing things that do not tie us to the limiting factors of current thinking, practice and resource.

The first path is about the maintenance of the status-quo. So even when we act sustainably we can in effect be going backward with the quality of our services diminishing. I refer to this approach as Rear-View path. It is largely reactive and although we seek to move forward with good intent, this is in effect like trying driving a car whilst focusing primarily on the rear-view mirror and not the windscreen.

The Rear-View is dominated by austerity methods such as staff cuts, wage-freezes, cost-cutting and a hold on new projects. With the Rear-View to sustainability we adopt reactive and precautionary approaches in which we seek to do the same things we have done in the past but faster and at less cost.  The Rear-View pathway is characterised by  short-term “management” thinking that ultimately contributes to a downward spiral in efficiency given that service demands usually increase, and cheaper and faster rarely equate to better.

The old mantra of doing more with less is fine but let’s focus on the more in addition to the less.

The second path to sustainability is a proactive one and through new design focuses on the “more”.

With design we seek to develop new ways of delivering the same value (or better) but in manners newly conceived. The thinking here is quite different to the Rear-View and I refer to it as Forward-View (not a real imaginative name I know, but it serves purpose!) On this Forward-View pathway we design and navigate our way forward with an eye firmly focused on the future. The Forward-View is characterised by new thinking, design and navigation. This pathway challenges the status quo and asks “Are they other ways we can do this better?”

Longer-term “leadership” thinking forms the basis for the Forward-View as we focus on What can be rather than the usual What is. Forward-View approaches involve the application of methods that assist organisations to build agility and navigate difficult times with greater impact.

These methods include:

1. New ways of focusing on and defining our real issues
2. New ways of thinking and collaborating,
3. New means of tapping into our diversity & knowledge,
4. The means of scanning and understanding the shifting environment,
5. New ways of generating genuinely new perspectives, insights & approaches, and
6. More practical means of safe implementation that are not bogged down with bureaucratic processes and the fear of failure.

Austerity methods absolutely have their place but we need to be aware of their limitations and not overuse them when better ways can be conceived.

Both pathways need to be applied and intertwine, but we must learn not to routinely default to the Rear-View path alone as our management practices to date have had us do.  The degree to which one pathway predominates is wholly dependent on context but an approach to sustainability that involves only one reactive pathway diminishes capacity over time, and this is not sustainable.

Organisations looking to build on their capacity to navigate difficult economic times and make sustainable practice a part of normal business are invited to contact us at Think Quick to discuss how we can assist in incorporating Forward-View thinking and action with a view to building business efficiency and proactive sustainable practices.

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During a discussion on elephant conservation a friend once commented tongue in cheek, “Wouldn’t be interesting to hear what the elephants had to say in an anecdote circle?” This was one of those crazy and provocative comments that quite often act as a stepping stone to an even better proposition. Right now, we need lots of good propositions because the Asian Elephant population which once numbered in the millions is diminishing at a rate of knots and now numbers less than 30,000.

Elephants actually do have their own sophisticated language but we are not quite at the stage of comprehension. However ….. What if we undertook the next best thing? What if we collected the stories and experiences of the people that know the elephants better than anyone else in the world?  The elephant’s Mahouts.

In most instances an elephant and its Mahout are paired together at a young age and spend the remainder of their lives together. Collectively, the mahouts possess a body of knowledge about elephants that no one in academia or research can ever hope to match. Who better then, to provide experiences and insights that may assist in saving this species, which many are now suggesting may not survive beyond this current generation?

To assist the great many already undertaking elephant conservation work worldwide, Think Quick is now working with A Future with Elephants and has developed and commenced implementation of the Elephant Mahout Insight project (EMI) with a view to collecting the stories and experiences of the elephant mahouts across South East Asia and the rest of the world. Cognitive Edge from Singapore will be partnering us in this project by allowing us access to their unique Sensemaker software which we will use to both capture the narrative from the mahouts and to help build deeper insights and understandings about the elephant and its current, and future place in the world.

The insights gained will be shared with elephant stakeholders across South East Asia in a number of workshops where we hope to co-design new experiments, interventions and projects that will make a difference to the long term survival of the species. One of the most important premises of the EMI project is that we make no claims about our knowledge of elephants and how to save them, but rather we will rely upon the distributed intelligence of those that work with elephants on the ground in Asia. Our skill lies in capturing the narrative, helping stakeholders to make sense of the patterns appearing and assisting assisting them to design new ways forward.

It is important to note also that there are many elephant experts across South East Asia who are, and have already undertaken significant research with mahouts and we hope to incorporate as much of this knowledge as possible into the EMI project.

In addition to the opportunity to gain insight and design new interventions in this conservation effort, the narrative collected will also serve as an ongoing knowledge repository which will be made available to interested parties and researchers globally to aid in future conservation efforts. Of course as the numbers of elephants decline so do mahout numbers and their collective knowledge. So another reason this activity is a priority is it will play an important part in capturing the experiences of mahouts while we still have them amongst us.

This approach to knowledge harvesting offers significant opportunity for any group or organisation that is facing the issue of an aging workforce and the subsequent skills shortages that many retirements will bring.

We believe this is one of the more resonant and extensive knowledge management projects being undertaken in the conservation / sustainability space at the moment and we hope to report on significant progress over the coming year.

Anyone seeking more information or would like to contribute to the project in some way, shape or form is very welcome to contact me.

Follow a Future with Elephants on Facebook & Twitter.

Frank Connolly

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One of the great difficulties in getting people to understand the absolute necessity for creativity and lateral thinking is that all good lateral solutions will appear logical in hindsight. So, if the solution is logical we don’t need lateral thinking only logical thinking. Right?

Wrong!

Lateral thinking allows us to change the way we perceive a given situation or issue by disrupting our usual way of perceiving it. Through this disruption we can begin to see new options and possibilities to help address an issue that we would not have otherwise considered.

The methods can throw our thinking into new and strange places we would not normally visit, and this in itself can be threatening to the thinker that relies solely on logic. It is because of this that the first port of call when we think laterally, is usually a place that can feel uncomfortable, strange or even a bit crazy. Unfortunately, this initial discomfort often proves to be too much for those that struggle beyond the linear.

The key thing to remember however is that from this “strange” place we can perceive the issue through a very different lens and start to generate new and novel ideas to address the issue. We all know the old sayings, from left field and outside the box, well unless you’re ready to actually jump into that field, or stray outside that box, you will rarely produce the new and novel ideas that our complex world now demands.

OK, we have been all theoretical to this point, so I’d now like to turn the concept of thinking laterally into real-life practice. To do this I’ll briefly describe some of the elephant conservation work using lateral thinking that we are currently undertaking across South East Asia.

First some very brief context. The numbers of Asian Elephants has diminished over the years from the 10′s of millions across Asia to a figure of around 30,000 or less. The reasons for this are many and include loss of natural habitat, hunting, reproductive issues and human/elephant conflict, which occurs when elephants decide they’d like to eat the crops of local villagers (and when a herd of wild elephants decide to eat your crop, you generally don’t argue.)

A future with Elephants (AFWE) is an action focused, conservation fund designing and applying experiments and projects to help save this highly intelligent and social creature from extinction. Some predict this extinction could be as soon as before the end of this century. With an initial focus on reducing human/elephant conflict, lateral thinking tools have been applied in the design of potential interventions.

The lateral approach initially applied was Provocation and Movement. With this approach we  ….

1. Establish what it is we’re trying to do: Eg: Design an effective barrier that can be placed between the elephants and the village crops.
2. We then discussed a range of factors, characteristics, descriptions, assumptions about things that may visually and physically deter an elephant.
3. Having done this we then set up Provocations, i.e. deliberately provocative statements that are designed to push our thinking into new places and provide a stepping stone for a new and better ideas.
4. Provocations commence with the word “Po” to clearly indicate the provocative nature of the statement, and in this instance one of our provocations was: “Po, we produce a barrier that is invisible to the elephant.”
5. Now, this is a seemingly strange statement, however it did allow us to look at the problem from different perspectives and the resultant perspective shift has realised a current project in Sri Lanka where NFE are recording and experimenting with the sounds of naturally occurring hornets as a deterrent to the elephant crop raiding. (Every year an average 60 people and 200 elephants in Sri Lanka, alone are killed as a result of this type of Human/Elephant conflict. 200 out of a total population of 3000 is horrendous.)

A fairly logical way of potentially deterring elephants you may say, but it took lateral thinking to produce this “logical” option.

The team then took this new idea and applied another lateral approach known as Concept Extraction. In this approach we:

1. Commence with a starting idea: i.e. “Use the sound of naturally occurring hornets to deter the approach of elephants.”
2. We then extracted a concept that underpins that idea: i.e. the concept of using sound as a deterrent.
3. The group then generated new ideas in which sound might be used to reduce crop raiding.
4. One of the many new ideas that arose has resulted in a major ongoing project to “Record and playback different elephant vocalisations as a deterrent to crop raiding.”
   

While these projects are currently underway and in their early stages, there has been some promising results recorded. Again all quite logical but arrived at by lateral thinking!

The point to which I am laboriously making my way is that there is some good news and some bad news.

The bad news is that we can no longer be so rigid in our thinking that we simply assume lateral thinking and creativity are not part of our “normal” business. As the world becomes increasingly, complex, connected and competitive we have an urgent need to dramatically increase our capacity to generate new ideas that will help us act with impact.

The good news is that you do not have to be a creative genius to think laterally. If you did, I wouldn’t be writing this now. You simply have to learn these powerful, process based tools and apply them to the areas in which you need new thinking, new options, new possibilities and new answers. In fact, why limit their application to problem areas, apply them to things that appear to going well, you’ll be surprised at the new potential they can shed light on.

(NB: Word just in from Sri Lanka (9:30pm 2/2/11) says that AFWE’s initial wild playback experiments have been completed and have achieved a 100% success rate at diverting elephants away from food sources.)

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